I. Field
The invention generally relates to wireless communications. More specifically, the invention relates to an apparatus and method for determining the log-likelihood ratio for turbo codes and branch metric for convolutional codes when precoding is used.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication such as voice, packet data, and so on. These systems may be based on code division multiple access (CDMA), time division multiple access (TDMA), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) or some other multiple access techniques.
Over a severe multi-path fading wireless channel, data transmission at a high rate with high spectral efficiency is a challenging task. Currently, OFDM is considered an effective modulation technique for such a channel. OFDM has been adopted for several wireless LAN standards. OFDM is also often considered for broadband wireless access (BWA) systems. Though OFDM modulation is indeed very effective in dealing with severe multi-path fading channel, it suffers from several disadvantages.
A disadvantage of OFDM systems is the overhead associated with the guard tones in frequency domain and cyclic prefix in time domain. Inefficiency also results from the data transmission block resolution problem. The minimum block size for transmission is the number of bits per OFDM symbol. This number can be large if the number of carriers is large and the high order modulation alphabet is used. For a burst data transmission system, since the frame length, in general, is not an integral multiple of number of bits per OFDM symbol, bits are wasted in padding. The wastage due to padding can be significant, especially for small frame length.
Another notable disadvantage of OFDM is its greater susceptibility to non-linearity and phase noise. The amplitude of the OFDM modulated signal is gaussian distributed. The high peak-to-average power ratio of an OFDM signal makes it susceptible to nonlinear or clipping distortion, as the signal peaks may occasionally thrust into the saturation region of the power amplifier. The result is bit error rate (BER) degradation and adjacent channel interference. Thus, larger output power back-off is needed to reduce the OFDM signal degradation.
OFDM used with good channel codes alleviates some of the problems described above. Channel coding in conjunction with a channel interleaver also eliminates the need for bit loading in OFDM system. However, channel coding does not solve the efficiency problem of OFDM. If the OFDM parameters are not properly selected, then the data transmission efficiency can be appreciably low.
Band limited single carrier system with high order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is widely used scheme for data transmission at high rate with high spectral efficiency for wire line as well as line-of-sight wireless system. It does not suffer from the above-mentioned disadvantages of OFDM. However, the channel equalization for single carrier system in severe multi-path fading channel is a difficult task. Linear equalizer fails to provide satisfactory performance. It has been found through simulation that even if a lower rate channel code is used with a single carrier system, in order to make the total overhead or the spectral efficiency the same for a single carrier and a OFDM system, the single carrier performance with linear equalizer and the ideal equalizer taps is only slightly better than the OFDM.
Use of a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) is well known to be very effective equalization technique for a channel with severe inter-symbol interference (ISI) problems. DFE requires the estimates of past symbols without delay to subtract the ISI contributed by them to the current symbol. If the past symbol estimates are error free, then the ISI contributed by them can be completely subtracted without enhancing noise. This explains the superior performance of ideal DFE, which assumes that error free estimates of the past symbols are available at the receiver. If an incorrect decision is made on the past symbol, then the error propagation can occur. It has been found through simulation that for a severe multi-path channel, the effect of error propagation is so bad that the performance of a DFE is worse than that of a linear equalizer.
A number of methods have been proposed to reduce the affect of the error propagation in the DFE. One method suggests assigning a reliability measure to each equalized soft symbol. The symbol estimate to be fed back to the DFE is based on this reliability. For example, if the equalized symbol has a high reliability, the hard decision is fed back; otherwise the equalized symbol without the hard decision is fed back.
Another method suggests iterating between equalization and channel decoder in a turbo-like manner and has been named “turbo-equalization” in the literature. The main idea is if the channel decoder generates better estimates of the code bits at its output than what it received from the equalizer at its input, this can be fed back to DFE. Consequently during the next iteration of DFE less error propagation will occur within DFE and so on. The first method has almost negligible incremental implementation complexity whereas the second method has substantial increase in complexity and delay. Unfortunately, these methods have been found to be only marginally effective in combating the effect of error propagation.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to reduce the affect of the error propagation.